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Hemispheric Differences in Figurative Language Journal of Neurolinguistics 26 (2013) 1–21 Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Journal of Neurolinguistics journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ jneuroling Review Hemispheric differences in figurative language processing: Contributions of neuroimaging methods and challenges in reconciling current empirical findings Kristina Kasparian* School of Communication Sciences and Disorders, McGill University, 1266 Pine Avenue West, Montreal, Quebec H3G1A8, Canada article info abstract Article history: The following review critically synthesizes the literature on hemi- Received 1 November 2011 spheric differences in idiom and metaphor comprehension. It has Received in revised form 3 July 2012 long been debated whether figurative language is inherently Accepted 3 July 2012 different from literal language and is processed specifically in the right hemisphere (RH), or rather, whether figurative and literal Keywords: language form a continuum rather than a dichotomy, and call Figurative language processing upon a similar network of brain areas. In this paper, a number of Right hemisphere Metaphors neuropsychological, behavioral and neuroimaging studies are Idioms reviewed in the context of major theoretical accounts of metaphor fMRI and idiom comprehension. Specifically, the role played by the RH in Divided visual field experiments metaphor and idiom processing is evaluated, and advancements Familiarity that neuroimaging methods have made to our understanding of figurative language comprehension are assessed. This review also highlights a number of critical methodological discrepancies between studies, and emphasizes how such inconsistencies in operational definitions, stimuli and tasks pose a serious challenge to reconciling the debate on hemispheric differences, and do not allow for a clear-cut conclusion of which neural networks underlie figu- rative language processing. Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. * Tel.: þ1 514 398 4400x09527; fax: þ1 514 398 8123. E-mail address: [email protected]. 0911-6044/$ – see front matter Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jneuroling.2012.07.001 2 K. Kasparian / Journal of Neurolinguistics 26 (2013) 1–21 1. Introduction The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learned from others; It is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an eye for resemblance. w Aristotle, De Poetica, 322 B.C. In our everyday language, we often hear people describe life as a roller-coaster ride, speak of broken hearts and open minds, and compare sly politicians to foxes. Occasionally, we give someone a taste of our own medicine, we lend them our ears and we bend over backwards to get something accom- plished. When we hear such expressions, whether they are commonly used or constructed on the fly, we know not to take them literally. In fact, if taken literally, most idiomatic and metaphoric expressions would be implausible or false. Instead, in order to grasp their intended meaning, we must often search beyond the strict literal sense of the constituent words and make a conceptual leap between two distant semantic domains which are normally unrelated to each other. The fact that figurative (or non- literal) language is so pervasive in our speech and understood effortlessly has intrigued philosophers and researchers from the time of Aristotle, and has been the subject of much research over the past few decades. More recently, our knowledge of the cognitive processes underlying figurative language comprehension – largely gained from neuropsychological investigations such as patient studies and behavioral investigations such as divided visual field experiments – has benefitted from advances in neuroimaging techniques. The aim of the current paper is to provide a critical review of the research examining the neurocognitive mechanisms for processing figurative language, with a specific emphasis on idioms and metaphors. Other forms of non-literal language such as sarcasm, humor and indirect requests will not be addressed. This review centers on the longstanding debate of whether figurative language is inherently different from literal language, or whether figurative and literal language form a continuum rather than a dichotomy and call upon similar processing strategies and brain areas during comprehension. This paper focuses on one of the major areas of controversy in research on figurative language comprehension: the question of HEMISPHERIC SPECIALIZATION in the comprehension of idioms and metaphors. Although there is also considerable debate around the question of how figurative language is stored and accessed during online processing, due to space constraints, the current review will not address the cognitive theories and recent neuroimaging research examining the time-course of access of idioms and metaphors. With respect to hemispheric specialization, it remains a much debated question whether, and to what extent, the right hemisphere (RH) is specialized for the comprehension of idiomatic and metaphoric language compared to the left hemisphere (LH), due to hemispheric differences in meaning analysis and integration. Whereas some neuropsychological and neuro- linguistic evidence has supported the “RH is special” theory (Anaki, Faust, & Kravetz,1998; Bottini et al., 1994; Winner & Gardner, 1977), other studies have found no RH involvement (Faust & Weisper, 2000; Kacinik & Chiarello, 2007; Lee & Dapretto, 2006; Rapp, Leube, Erb, Grodd, & Kircher, 2004; Stringaris, Medford, Giampetro, Brammer, & David, 2007) and still some others have argued that the degree of RH recruitment depends on lexical and contextual factors rather than figurativity per se (Mashal, Faust, & Hendler, 2005; Mashal, Faust, Hendler, & Jung-Beeman, 2007; Schmidt, De Buse, & Seger, 2007). To date, there is still no consensus on what precise aspects of figurative language the right hemisphere may be particularly sensitive to. The controversial findings in the literature will be critically synthesized within the framework of main theoretical accounts of hemispheric differences in processing idioms and metaphors. First, the review will cover early neuropsychological studies, as these patient data played a key role in moti- vating the “RH is special” theory. Next, the debate of whether the RH is indeed primarily responsible for processing figurative language will be evaluated in the light of divided-visual field experiments, as well as several neuroimaging studies. The goals of this paper are threefold: (1) to review the role of the RH in processing idioms and metaphors, by contrasting evidence for and against this theory, from a range of methodologies; (2) to evaluate the contributions of neuroimaging studies, and assess whether these findings have extended the knowledge gained from behavioral paradigms, and (3) to highlight K. Kasparian / Journal of Neurolinguistics 26 (2013) 1–21 3 a number of important and largely under-studied discrepancies across studies which (a) make it difficult to synthesize the literature and decisively resolve the “RH is special” debate, and (b) need to be systematically investigated and disentangled in current/future research in order to convincingly argue in favor of hemispheric differences or to adopt one particular theory over another. It will be argued that, although neuroimaging proves to be a useful method for shedding some light on this question, and although both behavioral and neuroimaging paradigms have greatly advanced our knowledge about hemispheric differences in figurative language processing beyond early findings from patient studies, much work remains to be done, as most of the inconsistent results that fuel the debate seem to arise from methodological or theoretical issues across studies. For example, studies differ in how they operationally define and select metaphors and idioms. Some studies only examine metaphoric word pairs without a sentential context and, at times, it is not clear whether these should be considered metaphors at all or whether the metaphoric meaning has grown to be so conventional over time that these could actually be construed as ambiguous literal words (e.g. “bright student”, “stinging insult”)(Anaki et al., 1998; Mashal et al., 2005). Furthermore, some researchers have failed to control for the degree of familiarity or novelty of the figurative expressions tested in their experiments, a variable which has been strongly argued to affect the neural mechanisms underlying semantic processing (Beeman, 1998; Giora, 1997, 2003). Moreover, studies differ considerably in the task per- formed by participants, some of which involve more complex judgment processes that are more cognitively demanding and that may more heavily involve brain areas not typically activated in online figurative language comprehension. This paper aims to increase awareness of how these factors are likely to affect the processing of literal and non-literal language, and are likely to contribute to the heterogeneity of empirical findings on the role of the RH. While it is an obvious and well-known fact that methodological differences across studies will lead to different results, the argument here is that these differences must be systematically investigated in future experiments, in order to assess the relative impact of each of these factors on modulating neural activation patterns and hemispheric differences during figurative language processing. Otherwise, neglecting to do so could hinder our understanding of whether –
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